Thambar
Some things refuse to be seen clearly. They dance just beyond the grasp of focus, hovering in a soft glow, dissolving into perfect halos of light—luminous and untethered, floating between the real and the imagined. That’s where beauty lives. Not in the obvious, the sharp, the neatly defined—but in the haze, in the moment between perception and understanding.
Thambos means to be blinded by beauty, to be struck by awe so completely that it disorients you. I wonder if the Greeks knew how that feels through glass—the way light bends, the way shadows blur, the way a face dissolves into something more than a face. It’s not about losing sight. It’s about seeing differently.
The Thambar lens, which I affectionately refer to as "the other woman," and she was born in 1935—far beyond the digital anemia of today's megapixel world. And yet, she handily competes for attention with all the other lenses in my kit. Mesmerizing me with her rendering of highlights and her ethereal glow, she turns the world into an echo of itself, leaving the others in my bag feeling almost too sharp, too clear, too predictable.
I let her have it. I let the light bleed, the edges fade. I let wonder lead, and I followed—not to find answers, but to unravel the definable, to dissolve certainty, to create something that lingers—not a “photograph” in the conventional sense, but an impression, more like a 19th century oil painting on canvas, where light and shadow merge into feeling rather than fact.
